Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 November 2023
Chapter 3 examines policing as a street-level form of governance which is central to racial capitalism. Focusing on the murder of Marielle Franco and police violence in Rio de Janeiro, it argues that policing functions as an ongoing war on groups and communities deemed wayward, delinquent, and undeserving: what I describe as a ‘war on dirt’. From Rio to London, Ireland to India, policing has been a key mechanism through which the state orders bourgeois society. Policing thus understood is a dirt-producing system which orders as it rejects, sanitizes as it represses. Drawing on afro-feminist quilombismo and recent work on black anarchism, the chapter argues that the struggle for police abolition must be anarchised and extended to target the racial capitalist state as a whole. Viewed antipolitically, abolition requires a break, not just with carcerality, but with state logics and governance in its entirety.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.